- Title: Gosling and Crowe play not so 'Nice Guys' in a seedy 70s Los Angeles
- Date: 20th May 2016
- Summary: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (RECENT) (REUTERS) (SOUNDBITE) (English) ACTOR RUSSELL CROWE SAYING: "I think there's an inherent sadness to Jackson Healy which I found quite attractive at the age that he is, don't really know what he's done before this, but here he is at that age still trying to make himself useful to people, so if you take away the glitz of the movie aspect, this is a very traditional clown character. Getting to work with Ryan, that was something that I thought about quite a bit in the last few years as I saw him mature as an actor and I started to really respect what he was doing, so that was a pretty fabulous opportunity that I wanted to take up as well."
- Embargoed: 4th June 2016 19:57
- Keywords: The Nice Guys
- Location: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES/UNIDENTIFIED LOCATIONS
- City: BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES/UNIDENTIFIED LOCATIONS
- Country: USA
- Topics: Film
- Reuters ID: LVA0024IM6MA5
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text: Films about Hollywood often harken the glamour, glitz and golden age of cinema, but "The Nice Guys," gives a very different sheen to Los Angeles in the late 1970s.
Writer-director Shane Black's vision of Los Angeles comes to the big screen in the caper "The Nice Guys," out in U.S. theaters on Friday (May 20). It follows two hopeless private eyes, Holland (Ryan Gosling) and Jackson (Russell Crowe).
The duo meet when Jackson breaks Holland's arm. Grudgingly, they team up to solve an ever-deepening mystery of a missing girl that brings them face to face with the porn and automotive industries.
"This is like an anti-buddy movie," Crowe said. "There's not one bit of familial connection between these two guys that happens once, not a friendly gesture, nothing, they just happen to be stuck in a situation together."
Crowe and Gosling engage in witty banter throughout the film as they find themselves in increasingly bizarre and surreal situations.
Crowe's Jackson is the rough, looming counterpart to Gosling's hapless, quip-filled Holland, who is often brought to task by his pre-teen daughter Holly (played by newcomer Angourie Rice), a relationship that Gosling said he enjoyed playing.
"He's just such a disaster," Gosling said of his character. "He's seconds away all the time from being the worst person ever, and he has this daughter that's literally propping him up and trying to help him be a good person."
Gosling said the film's underlying plot could resonate with present day social themes.
"It's obviously not a political film in any way, but yet somehow it incorporates an atmosphere from that time in the 70s that kind of ended up mirroring ours now in a strange way. I don't know if he planned that, I'm sure he couldn't predict where we'd be now but I think he's just tapped in as a great writer and it feels very three dimensional," he said. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
- Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2016. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
- Usage Terms/Restrictions: None